Vincent Cheung

Vincent Cheung's Blog


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Friday, May 26, 2006

So apparently maiming, raping, and killing are frowned upon in this country

CDS orientation today all the way in San Francisco. Most useless thing I have ever been to. CDS is the company that Google uses to handle the visas for the foreign interns and we have to go to this retarded orientation session.

Did you know that you have to tip in restaurants, hair salons, nail parlours, and other service based industries? Did you know that they put sales tax ontop of the posted price in stores? How about that the drinking age is 21 and you're not allowed to drive while drunk? Or that banks often have hidden charges?

Then there was info on housing and suggestions on where to look and that they recommend an American roommate! Umm... I've been here almost 4 weeks... I would hope that I have a place to live by now...

Some of this info might have been usefule BEFORE I came (eg. social security card info, car leasing, housing, bank info, driver's license), but not after being here for so long. Plus, pretty much everything was common sense.

Ok, granted that some of this info may have been a surprise for some of the Europeans or Asians, but seriously, Canadians need an exception from this shit. Great line I heard today over dinner: Canada is America's hat.

Worse yet, everything was done using transparencies. They could have just sent us the pdf or something and saved us all a bunch of time... Fortunately it was just over an hour (originally scheduled for 2.5 hours), but after strolling around and lunch, parking for 2.5 hours costed $17.50 AMERICAN! That is the most expensive parking I've ever experienced. Absolutely insane. At least there were 4 of us.

Oh, and the presenter annoyed me SO bad everytime she said "veesuh". I can't get it to phonetically come across as poorly pronounced as she said it, especially with her slightly southern drawl. She like really blended the s with the "vee" and didn't end with an "a", rather it was like a southern "a". I've never heard "visa" prounounced like that before and it just really annoyed me... and believe me, she at least tried to say "visa" a billion times.


Other random things today... It was a weekday and I didn't have ANY meals at Google! Calm down, don't get too worried about me. I'm fine. Just that I had breakfest at home (b/c of stupid orientation in SF in the morning), lunch in SF (random food court with fake chinese food in what almost looked like Chinatown), and dinner at the bowling alley (just a bit of food) and Amy's dinner party (never met so many lawyers in my life).

When people mention bowling to me, I think 5 pin bowling. From what John tells me (no, not that one, the other John, the original John), they don't have 5 pin bowling down here. I think I enjoy 5 pin more. Maybe b/c I'm better at 5 pin than 10, since I've only ever gone 10 pin bowling like twice. For those of you who don't know, 5 pin bowling only has 5 pins (*shock*). The balls are smaller (they fit in the palm of your hand), the pins are spread out more, the pins are worth different amounts (head is 5, two sides are 3, and the two ends are 2), and you throw 3 balls a frame. I don't remember my previous 10 pin bowling scores, so I'm not sure how my performance today compared. I think my first 2 games today were like 62, but then I stepped it up in the 3rd with a 126 (I saved all my spares and strikes for the final game). It's seemingly such a simple concept, but what I envision in my mind is just not what happens in real life, I just suck (pretty much like in pool, but I'm playing quite a bit of pool nowadays at Google so I'm getting better). I think I'll stick to volleyball.

One more random thing. I had two people mention my blog today. I find it kinda strange/interesting to meet all these people that I've somewhat communicated with through the Google interns group (like a message board) and other interns' blogs. The second blog mention in regular conversation happened at the dinner party though. Apparently Amy's friends were a little protective of her having a guy roommate, so they were checking up on me and Craig was like, I saw your blog and read your post about chicken noodle soup and was like, he's cool. So there you go, my blog did help me get my place (and 4 other offers).

1 Comment:

Sarah said...

ummmm, let me talk to amy's friends and set them straight

(A)

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